Adore Tea – Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

Yesterday some friends and I went out to Gold Creek to put a deposit on our Bridesmaid dresses and decided to celebrate the occasion with a trip to Adore Tea to try out their (relatively) new Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Held on Sundays, the Tea Party compliments their already popular Saturday High Teas and is set up more like a buffet than a service.

Adore Tea is located at the back of Federation Square and is comprised of the small dining room and tea shop inside, plus a large outside area on either side of the doors. The outdoor area is full up on this sunny Sunday, and everyone is enjoying their time outside, after a few rainy weeks.

We we arrived for the Tea Party, we were greeted by the Mad Hatter himself and then escorted through a small door to a cordoned off area of the outdoor space. The space is set up to accommodate maximum personage, with a few long tables to carter for bigger groups and a few smaller tables, all squashed right in close together. I’d not been sat down for five minutes and I was already over people banging in to the back of my chair. Each table has their own Alice themed name plate – we were the Card Soldier table – and you’re provided a plate, a tea cup and cutlery. The space is decorated with fun Alice themed pictures and other cute tidbits, and the staff are dressed to an Alice inspired wardrobe – I love the premise!

At the end of the tables, the food and tea is set up like a buffet – with savoury snacks to start and then progressing on to sweets. Tea is littered throughout the tables, served in Adore Tea’s signature glass teapots with warmers – each teapot has a tag on its handle listing what tea is within.

Unfortunately, as this is buffet style, you have to stand in line and wait for other people to get their food / push in. From my place in line, I can see people touch food inappropriately (usually after they’ve taken 20 minutes to decide what they want but then change their minds). People are gross. This is not Adore Tea’s fault – it’s just human nature and I hate people, so I immediately dislike this set up.

I suck it up, give some death stares to the plebs and then grab a bunch of stuff on my plate so that my return visits are infrequent. First up is a plate of salad, sandwiches and cheese – I have this with Duchess and Afternoon Bliss, both smooth black teas to compliment the savoury tastes on the plate.

The sandwiches – chicken and rocket, and cucumber – are okay but don’t have much filling. Very different from the ones you get with the high tea. The cheeses have been left out for quite some time and, as mentioned above, people are idiots and don’t know how to cut cheese in an appropriate shape for sharing. All of the salads on offer are heavy on vinegar, which I am allergic to, so I opt for the pesto pasta which is tasty, but a bit too oily.

The teas are beautiful – as always. Adore does awesome teas, I have about 6000000 (count those zeros).

I decide to try some of the iced teas, which were lovely and refreshing, while my friends went in search of the famed Adore Tea scones.

I was sitting back down at the table when one of the girls returned with a clean plate and a quarter of a scone. Turns out there was one and a half scones left when she had approached the scone station and she – being a nice, polite, young lady – offered the last whole scone to the elderly gentleman behind her. This was also because she logically thought that she would instead reap the benefits of being the first to the new, possibly piping hot, batch that would follow. But as it turned out, this was not to be the case. No scones left meant no scones left. Less than half way through our sitting they had run out of scones because they’d “had a busy morning” – so two of my friends halved the last half scone (quarter of a scone!). No matter, I thought, surely some more will be coming out soon. It only takes 20 minutes to cook scones.

But then we heard one of the staff say “we’ll definitely make more next time”. Next time? Promptly the scone station was replaced with this:

The flyer for the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party actually states – word for word – “Scones – what would a tea party be without scones?” What indeed? Instead the scones were replaced by tiny bites that did not satisfy and certainly did not rectify a loss of scones. The realisation that they would not be making more scones was confusing and infuriating. Did it not occur to them that IT ONLY TAKES 20 MINUTES TO COOK SCONES??? Scones consist of flour, milk, butter, baking powder, salt and cream to serve – don’t have one of these ingredients? GO TO THE SHOPS AND GET SOME! Don’t have Jam – YOU SELL IT ON YOUR SHELVES. It’s not the first time a signature dish has been unavailable to me, due to popularity, but it is certainly the first time I could have marched out the back and cooked the effing things myself!

And yes, I did over react – the promise of scones is one of the top reasons I visit Adore, the other being the tea itself…but I can order that online. If you’ve had the Adore Tea scones, you’ll understand. So this is both a bad review and a good review in that the scones are so good that I’ve actually gone mad with delirium for not getting them. Honestly I wanted to throw food at the staff.

Pissed off with the lack of sconage, I threw some of the sweets on to a plate and sulked in to my rooibos chai tea like an over indulged child.

The sweets consisted of a rich caramel slice, a delicious caramel macadamia, a chai fudge and an apple crumble like slice. They’re all nice. But they’re not scones.

There’s nothing left to dip in to the chocolate fountain, and I’m not big on lollies, so I’m done at this stage. I ran in to the shop to buy another 60000000 teas, so I missed the raffle (which requires you to be wearing a hat when your name is called out – bit of fun but I had no hat).

When we paid I mentioned to the girl behind the counter that I was upset there were no scones and she did apologise, but with a bit of a ‘whatcha gonna do’ shrug. I’m going to write a blog, young lady, that’s what I am going to do!

MOVING ON!

The staff at Adore are cute young things, with a collective age of about nine – they are friendly and enthusiastic. They are knowledgeable about the tea they sell and are happy to engage in conversation with a tea nerd like me. I have been coming out to Adore Tea since day dot and have experienced nothing but good service here.

So in short – Adore Tea is awesome, but they ran out of scones. I would highly, highly, recommend the High Tea on Saturdays though – an interesting menu, they never run out, the scones are hot… scones.

{Edit – Adore Tea contacted me and were very apologetic about the lack of scones. They assured me it was the first time it had happened and they would endevour to make sure it would be the last. Nothing makes us for a dissapointing experience like great customer service and assurance that your feedback is being used – 10 points to Adore!}

Post navigation

One thought on “Adore Tea – Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”

Oh my gosh you had me gigling through this whole thing even though I understand how upsetting the lack of scones was for you – my favourite line “I’m going to write a blog, young lady, that’s what I am going to do!”